Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (review)

Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Friedrich Kittler. Translated with an Introduction by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999. $55.00 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).

Since the days of Karl Kraus, Siegfried Kracauer, and Walter Benjamin, German cultural criticism has not displayed the playfulness and creative originality that is often seen in French postwar intellectuals such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari, to name a few. Friedrich Kittler proves a welcome exception to the standardized academic writing of many of his German colleagues. In his work he reactivates a legacy of modernism in which mass culture and elitist traditions are much less distant than commonly assumed and provide the productive tension for innovative insight conveyed through novel form. His provocative studies on the impact of technology upon the traditional arts remind us that the founding moment of modernism and its diverse expressions across Europe and the United States is located in the historical transition from traditional bourgeois to modern mass culture.

Kittler's Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, originally published in Germany in 1986 (excerpts appeared in English translation in October 41 [1987]) is now finally available in its full length. This book follows an earlier translation of Discourse Networks, 1800/1900 (1990) and gives the reader a broader picture of Kittler's unorthodox and innovative range of scholarship. The excellent translation by Geoffrey-Winthrop Young and Michael Wutz is highly readable, without awkward Germanisms, and is preceded by a thorough and incisive introduction that situates the reader in the context of media criticism in general and Kittler's work specifically. Their emphasis on the postideological dimensions of media studies and the attempt to understand the media landscape on its own terms is particularly helpful, and the authors avoid jumping to quick judgments concerning its co-opted status in commodity industries of the present. While such a critique is inevitable, it may have to be refined to accommodate Baudrillard, as Young and Wutz claim, by acknowledging that media are "not coefficients but effectors of ideology" (xv). Media do not merely mediate but simultaneously reflect the socio-political conditions of their possibility in their various forms of mediation. Media, as the translators stress, do not conceal their political status but draw attention to their mass-produced and mechanical nature. Or, in the words of the early media critic Karl Kraus, "The distortion of reality in the report is the true report about reality." ¹

Kittler's work bears out Benjamin's groundbreaking insights concerning the mechanical reproducibility of art and its radical reframing of the human sensorium. The distinct areas of acoustics, optics, and writing transformed by the media of gramophone, film, and typewriter are at the heart of Kittler's formal inquiries into new systems of graphic notation that supersede the dominant mode of symbolic, alphabetical writing in Western history. He even sharpens Benjamin's thesis by postulating that the absence of so-called human reflexivity makes technological recording devices such as the phonograph, the cinematograph, and the typewriter possible. As Kittler puts it (in mock-Cartesian terms), "Phonographs do not think, therefore they are possible" (33). Cultic remnants of art such as aura or soul are not merely suspended in technological reproductions but escape these new writing systems altogether. It is in the nature of technology to record manifestations of human and social reality in absolute indifference to the concerns of man. For Kittler, this radical departure from Western humanism constitutes the avant-garde core of technology that reinvents our sense perception from beyond ourselves.

The present volume is Kittler's most accessible work so far, written for the expert and the general reader alike. Its clear structure, with separate sections on the gramophone, film, and typewriter, helps locate the reader in an otherwise anecdotal and often loosely associated prose enhanced by textual and visual montage. The book includes a series of treatments of technology by Rainer Maria Rilke, Maurice Renard, Salomo Friedlander, Richard Berman, Martin Heidegger, and...